Michelle Obama To Save U.S. Fashion Industry?

Fashion designers and retailers are holding their breath that the new First Lady can save their ailing industry both by reshaping trends and giving a boost to the businesses of high and low-end lines.

If they had their way she’d be doing five wardrobe changes a day, but no Gucci, or other foreign labels, please.

NY Times: She brought to the campaign a sophisticated approach to high-low dressing, a determination to adapt designers’ work to suit herself — adding jewelry or sweaters or wearing flat shoes with sheaths or even altering dressmaking details — as well as a forthright conviction that it is the woman who should wear the clothes and not the other way around.

Insignificant as this may seem in the larger scheme of things, it is less so when one considers the distressing state in which American fashion has found itself lately, with both chain and department stores shutting their doors, consumers confidence at its lowest level in decades and manufacturers struggling to remain afloat in what, as May Chen, the international vice president of the union group Unite Here, explained, “has always been a very credit-sensitive industry.”…

(For the record, we have no idea of what she’s talking about.)

American fashion, said Steven Kolb, the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, like the American automobile and banking industries, is “at a crossroads” in dire need of some kind of boost..

…”What the first lady wears has a lot of effect on the industry, absolutely,” said Arnold Scaasi, who began designing clothes for the wives of American presidents during the term of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The first lady, Mr. Scaasi said, “is seen every day in some form of media, and what she looks like is copied by other women.”